The shower is a walk-in with a glass door. The tiny circles of tile on the floor are grippy. I run my hand along the slick walls and step under the spray. It feels amazing and I sigh as it rushes over me. Dr. Guilder stands at the open door. I close my eyes and focus on the sensation of my body. It’s heavy and weak. But still here. Still standing.
“You’re very strong,” Dr. Guilder says. “But I’d like to see you get even stronger before the baby comes. We need to get you to the gym. Taking walks. Do you think you’re up for that?”
“Yes,” I answer. “I do.”
And for the first time since getting pregnant I actually feel like I can have this baby. Not just carrying it around, but birth it, love it, and keep it alive. I don’t know where this new confidence comes from. But I’ll take it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I love montages in movies. The music, the sweat, the persistence, the victory. Like Rocky’s cinematic evolution from out-of-shape palooka to lean, trim, hard-punching heavyweight. The next two weeks of my life were like a montage with the sweat and the persistence but the victory…not so much.
I practiced tai chi on the beach and that definitely improved over the two weeks. My walks became longer, the weights I could lift at the gym went from three pounds to five…because I am a machine.
But I wasn’t jumping around on the top of museum steps. I wasn’t jumping anywhere. Or doing any fast movements in general. In triumphant montages people tend to get faster. I got slower.
I didn’t paint a nursery either. No overalls with a splash of paint on my big belly.
But Mulberry did find the necessary parts and made a crib. That did something to my heart. Made it beat a little different. When the father of your baby builds a crib—that’s the feeling Hallmark is constantly trying to capture. The warm fuzzies swarm the room, an army on a mission.
Mulberry stands back, hands on his hips, admiring his handiwork. “What do you think?” he asks. It’s set up next to my bed, the little mattress covered in a sheet with yellow duckies marching across it.
“Looks great,” I say. Blue, sitting next to me, taps his snout to my hip as if he agrees.
Mulberry turns to me and grins. “I’m so excited.”
“Me too,” I admit. “I’m really getting ready to meet this little person.”
My hand falls to my belly and my son—our son—moves. Mulberry steps closer. “May I?” he asks.
I take his wrist and place his hand where the baby is shifting. Mulberry’s smile grows. “Thank you.” He says it so quietly I almost don’t hear. “Thank you,” he says again, a little louder. And his eyes rise to mine. “For giving me this—for making me a dad.”
Tears well in my gaze and I shake my head, not able to look at him anymore. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I say, trying to make a joke, but Mulberry won’t let me.
“You could have chosen not to continue the pregnancy. I would have understood. But you’ve gone through this, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. And I want you to know I appreciate that. I know how hard it is for you.”
We are standing close, his hand on my belly. I force myself to meet his gaze. And then I’m rising up on my toes, putting my hands on his shoulders, and kissing him. It’s sweet and salty with my tears.
Mulberry’s hand slides around to my low back and his other cups my cheek. The kiss is gentle and slow. As if we have all the time in the world to be together. As if Robert Maxim’s deadline hasn’t reached its end. As if he doesn’t even exist. And it’s just me and the father of my child kissing after he built our son a crib.
A boom, like a giant explosion in the distance, sounds. The ground shakes and we both stumble, catching each other. Our focus turns to the window. A deep rumbling comes from the earth. “What is that?” I ask in a whisper, as if I don’t want the monster shaking the world to hear me.
Outside the sky is still robin’s egg blue, the ocean glinting in all its glory, the sun shimmering and dancing on the swells. “I don’t know,” Mulberry says. “Let’s find out.”
His hand drops to mine and he twines our fingers. Blue follows as we move out into the hall. Dan’s voice comes over the speakers.
“This is Dan Burke. That sound we all just heard was an underwater volcano about forty-five miles east of here erupting. We should expect a tsunami and possibly more eruptions. So please stay indoors. I’ll update as we have more information.”
Mulberry squeezes my hand and starts moving toward the elevators. Dread pools in my low belly. We head down to the operations room, five stories underground. The room is buzzing. The large screen that takes up the entire front wall displays a satellite image in black and white. At the center a cloud expands—growing and tumbling on itself. It looks like a nuclear blast.
The rows of stations, each with their own screens, are full. This room, the nerve center for Joyful Justice’s missions in various parts of the world, always reminded me of NASA’s headquarters—Houston, we have a problem…
All eyes of Dan’s team follow us as we move toward the spiral stairs leading up to his office—the glass box that overlooks the space.
We don’t bother knocking, just push in. Dan sits at his desk, which faces out on the operations center. He’s got four monitors on—one shows the volcano eruption, another is a feed of code that means nothing to me, one is split into camera views of outside, and the last one is a bunch of open windows that, again, mean nothing to me.
“Hey,” Dan says without looking up. “This is bad.”
“Talk to me.” Mulberry pulls up a free chair and sits. I keep standing, Blue by my side.
“The explosion—it’s caused a massive lightning storm. It will probably reach us.” Dan points to the monitors filled with images from outside. The horizon is a dark mass of clouds, struck through with lightning. “The ash will be here very soon. And of course, there will be a tsunami any minute.”
“We’re in a mountain,” I say. “So we should be fine, right?”
Dan shakes his head. “A lot of our food is grown outside. Our solar and wind power sources are outside. Ash will likely cover the entire island. It will destroy drinking water. We have extra supplies, but they won’t last more than a week or two. And I’m not sure what the lightning will do to our systems. The tsunami could flood the garage and destroy our vehicles, not to mention the power generators on ground level—we have backups on the top of the mountain so power should come back on quickly. The planes may be toast, though. They are in the hangar but the waves could wash everything away—it’s the flattest part of the island. And we could lose our internet.” He says this last part as if he’s just told us we may have to put down the family dog.
Dan sits back and turns to me. His skin is pale and his mouth is pinched. “And this may just be the first eruption. The instruments on the volcano were destroyed by the blast. I’m in the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program computers, monitoring their Slack channel. They are freaking out.” He gestures to one of the windows on the fourth monitor where a chat conversation pings. “Scrambling to figure out what’s happening.”
My eyes are drawn to the surveillance cameras of our exterior. The monitor is split into a grid, three images on top and three on the bottom. They all show the east side of the island.
The mountain goes straight to the sea on the east side—the beach is on the west. There is a walking path that circles the entire mountain, cutting through vegetation and rock on the east side. In storms, waves often hit that rocky mountainside, spraying up dramatically—but never getting close to the path. At least not that I’ve seen.
The three cameras on the top row provide different angles of the narrow dirt track—an overview from a wide angle lens, then two smaller views, one over the entrance to the path from our mountain refuge, and the other over the curve of the path where it disappears around the east side of the mountain.
The bottom three capture the shoreline. One is an overview, which appears to be mounted just beyond the path and shows a wide angle of the shoreline and the horizon. Then two closer angles similar as above—covering the two curves of the mountain where it plummets into sea. So that no one can sneak onto our shores without being caught on camera.
There are more camera angles Dan is not presently displaying. I glance up at the large screen that takes up the front of the command room. There are dozens of camera boxes on one side that can be accessed as needed.
